The artist Jeremy Deller once gifted me a brick wrapped in newspaper. It was from a demolished factory building in Salford that had been co-founded in 1837 by the father of Friedrich Engels. Concerned that his son was mixing with too many young revolutionaries at home in Germany, Engels Senior deployed his son at the Salford factory, only for Engels Junior to discover that Salford and the adjoining city of Manchester were also hotbeds of radical politics.
Young Engels documented the condition of the working class in England primarily through his adventuring in Manchester, and the self-organisation of the working poor in the city helped shape his Communist Manifesto.
Jeremy knew I would like to add the Engels brick to another brick in my possession: one from the Haçienda nightclub, founded in May 1982 and co-owned by the record label Factory Records, and their most successful act, New Order. The club closed in June 1997 and was subsequently demolished.
Between these two bricks a remarkable story can be told, beginning with the rise of Manchester as a global industrial powerhouse trading in textiles. In the early 1870s it was one of the ten wealthiest cities on earth, but 100 years later a post-industrial malaise hit the city hard. Then, during the so-called “Madchester” music explosion in the latter half of the Eighties — when the Haçienda played a pioneering role in the birth of electronic dance music — Manchester became the most talked-about music city in the world. The International Music Summit estimates electronic dance music festivals and clubs, globally, now have an annual value of $2.5 billion.
The Haçienda is more famous now than ever, celebrated in books, documentaries and films including 24 Hour Party People (starring Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson, the highest profile member of the Factory Records family). This month, the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Haçienda will be marked with a “rave in a car park” underneath the block of apartments built on the former site of the club.
Manchester in the early Eighties, along with so many other places — Detroit, Manhattan, Liverpool, Birmingham — suffered from rising unemployment, an exodus of its population, and a landscape of urban decay. In 1982 there was an estimated 20 million square feet of empty industrial floor space, much of it old cotton mills.
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